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What is your FriendStory? Honor the girl you were, and the girl she was, by sharing it.

Decide which friendship you’ll be writing about. “Best friends” can define a lifelong experience, or one that lasted only a week.

Check out the Prompts page if you’re having a hard time knowing exactly how to begin. Writing about a specific day or moment is often much easier than trying to generally capture the whole friendship.

Your piece can take the form of an essay, a poem, or anything that’s nonfiction—a comic, a film, an original song, a spoken-word piece, or anything else. The ideal essay is between 250 and 1000 words long.

Friendstories.com aims to be an inclusive, positive place, one that focuses on the experience of the person writing the story. Ideally, you’ll include your full name with your submission, but please consider the feelings of the friend you are writing about before deciding on how to refer to her. So far we’ve had submissions that refer to the “friend” by a first initial, her nickname, or simply a pronoun. And, in the case you want to tell a story but are concerned that even including your name might give away too much, you can always publish anonymously.

Along with your story, please include a short bio (two sentences or less) including any links to your website, your Twitter feed, or any other contact information.

If possible, please also include either a photograph of yourself from the same era as your story, or of yourself with the friend you’re writing about (if you’re including a picture with multiple people in it, please be sure to let us know which person is you). If you don’t provide a photograph, we’ll likely use a stock photo.

I’m Miranda Beverly-Whittemore. FriendStories grew out of my novel Bittersweet, and the girlhood friendship central to that story. Girlhood friendships can be passionate, secretive, playful, brutal, and more. They are how we discover who we want to be.